Great comment, thanks! Yeah, there’s a growing “bread line” of big companies that seem to have lost themselves somewhere between the economy of the 80s and 90s and that of today. I recently heard an NPR story about how Wonder Bread was suffering from this same sort of identity crisis as well.

Not only is it schizophrenia, but a lack of being able to change business models that hurts. E.g. you think that because you make Widget X and everyone loves Widget X, Widget X is your company. But if Widget X is no longer desired in the marketplace, and you’re not doing anything to create Widget Y, you’re headed the way of the dodo bird.

My wife, who cared for and homeschooled our nine children got a bit bored at home when number nine reached the age of five, so she took a part-time job at Sears. I used to laugh at some of the stories she brought home about what management was doing there. It was abundantly clear that Sears had lost its bearings.

I’m old enough to remember in the early 1970′s when national retail numbers were reported, Sears was always in the number one position and their total revenues were not equaled (usually) by the next three national retailers combined.

In those days, Sears knew exactly what it was: It was a store that carried quality merchandise at reasonable prices and it was a nationwide catalog store that could deliver almost anything a family might need to the most remote parts of North Dakota or Montana. It also had a few of time-honored brands (e.g., Kenmore appliances, Craftsman tools).

However, when Sears began to lose business to WalMart, its executive management team also (apparently) lost sight of all the things that had made Sears great. The problem is: When a company doesn’t know who it is or what it does, the consumer certainly cannot know.

Sears’ marketing was all over the place. They didn’t know whether they wanted to be a brand leader, a quality leader, or a price leader. So, they wandered aimlessly back and forth between the three and alienated a good share of their existing customer base while attracting very few new customers.

Many VARs are in the same boat today. They don’t know if they are a software reseller that offers services or a services organization that offers software. Worse, when they would like to be (or become) a services organization that offers software, they are still rewarding people — in sales and elsewhere — on a model that says they are a software reseller that offers services.

Success is only an unexpected (but pleasant) occurrence in schizophrenic organizations. You must know who you are before you can clearly communicate to the market who you are.